ugh. "How do I know, my dear, what young men do?"

"Then how do _I_ know, father, what vulgar girls do?"

"I see--I see," he quickly returned.

But she spoke the next moment as if she might, odiously, have been
sharp. "What happens at least is that where there's a great deal of
pride there's a great deal of silence. I don't know, I admit, what _I_
should do if I were lonely and sore--for what sorrow, to speak of, have
I ever had in my life? I don't know even if I'm proud--it seems to me
the question has never come up for me."

"Oh, I guess you're proud, Mag," her father cheerfully interposed. "I
mean I guess you're proud enough."

"Well then, I hope I'm humble enough too. I might, at all events, for
all I know, be abject under a blow. How can I tell? Do you realise,
father, that I've never had the least blow?"

He gave her a long, quiet look. "Who SHOULD realise if I don't?"

"Well, you'll realise when I HAVE one!" she exclaimed with a short laugh
that resembled, as for good reasons, his own of a minute before. "I
wouldn't in any case have let her tell me what would have been dreadful
to me. For such wounds and shames are dreadful: at least," she added,
catching herself up, "I suppose they are; for what, as I say, do I know
of them? I don't WANT to know!"--she spoke quite with vehemence. "There
are things that are sacred whether they're joys or pains. But one
can always, for safety, be kind," she kept on; "one feels when that's
right."

She had got up with these last words; she stood there before him with
that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit
of their life together had not closed his sense, kept sharp, year after
year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object
with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite
with another--the appearance of some slight, slim draped "antique"
of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and
immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern
impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps
forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality,
the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the
smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost
in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a
precious vase. She had always had odd moments of striking him,
daughter of h